2009-12-01 Webster Hall

Setlist

Recording

• 1 Samuel 15:23
• Old College Try
• Psalms 40:2
• Love, Love, Love
• Romans 10:9
• Genesis 3:23
• Deuteronomy 2:10
• Enoch 18:14
• Genesis 30:3 (JD solo)
• Going to Port Washington (JD solo)
• Song for Dana Plato (JD solo)
• From TG & Y (JD solo)
• Going to Bristol (with Owen Pallett)
• Hebrews 11:40
• Song for Dennis Brown
• Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod
• Quito
• See America Right
• Against Pollution
• Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace (encore)
• This Year (encore)
• No Children (encore)
• Going to Georgia (encore)

Banter

• This is a song about when two people who love each other very much accept their lot in life to torture each other to death. It's called Old College Try. (Old College Try)
• One time me and Peter are going down 35, we were gonna play a show, I was trying to remember up in the dressing room whether it was at the Replay Lounge or the Jackpot Saloon. Those are both in Lawrence, Kansas across the street from each other, you can play there. And uh, and there's a, you know, there's normal people who going down the highway, they'll see a sign, you know, that says, oh, Yankee Stadium, oh lemme go see that, right? Those big famous places. And then there's the stuff that John wants to see when he's on tour, it's like, 'Creationist Museum? I don't know John, that sounds like a creepy...' And I was like, no, come on, man! Creationist Museum! You know, that'll be great! And this one time I was very adamant. I was like: we're going to the Precious Moments Chapel. I don't care how late we are to the show, I have to see the Precious Moments Chapel. I saw the Precious Moments Chapel. A few years later - this year - I thought, you know, wouldn't it be something if a couple of teenagers huffed a bunch of paint and went in there. This is called Psalms 40:2. (Psalms 40:2)
• Peter Hughes with one of my favorite bass lines of all time. (Love, Love, Love)
• Perry [Wright] has a master's degree in divinity. This is a song that I wrote - oh man, my therapist had me talk about this, I disclose too much. I have this - the thing about me is I'm not even in the slightest bit afraid of dying. I think, the kind of music I listen to, I'm into it, right? What I'm afraid of is living with infirmity forever and ever. Which I probably should have thought about when speed was cheap, and there was so much of it in Portland. Back when - here goes my day job forever - I was sharing needles in bath houses, I should have thought about how long I was going to want to live. Because members in my family live for appallingly long times. We live to be very very old, and I always imagine my grandfather pushing 90 like, 'God, this sucks, why couldn't I have been one of those guys who dies young?'. He didn't say that, of course, because what a horrible thing for a grandfather to say to a young man. That would scar you forever. Might scar you just if you thought about it. (Romans 10:9)
• This is gonna take a minute. There's probably a fair number of you, not knowing much about demographics but just guessing, whose parents were divorced at some point in their childhood. [Audience cheers] Yeah, man. You know, they did what they had to do. And so when that happens, you move, generally speaking. A few times, it sort of fragments things, and if you are five, as I was when my parents divorced, your memory of your childhood becomes this Edenic thing. Not only Edenic, but very large. My father built a house, or - built a room onto that house when I was like, four, and it was called the front room, and it was this big cathedral ceiling, amazing place. It had a piano in it and a record collection, and I would flip through the records and think so hard about music and, so, I was in SLO a few weeks ago on tour. Last tour I drove past the house. This time I went walking, and walked up - haven't been inside this house since I was 8, I walked up to the door and there was a poster of Snoop and Tupac on it. And said, 'Wow, do I still live here, did something happen?' So I stood there for a brief moment and I knocked, and the college students who were renting it let me in, and it was the tiniest house I had ever set foot in. It used to be a huge auditorium and now it was like. I do this everywhere I've ever lived. (Genesis 3:23)
• In order to do that, I gotta put down this guitar and ask back to the stage the amazing, the incredible.... Owen Pallett, Final Fantasy. However, instead of playing one of his awesome and incredible songs, I'm going to play one of my crude little things. (Going to Bristol)
• This is a song - you find out a thing happens, you can't bury your references anymore in the age of the internet, people will just take the phrase that sounds weird and plug it into Google, and find out what it is in seconds. I am hoping to one day run across a text so obscure that it is indexed nowhere, and then steal the entire thing and make it the song. But until that day comes, I have to come clean about choruses that I lifted from places, and this is from a video game called Odin's Sphere. [Audience cheering] Oh man, I feel bad for people clapping for Odin's Sphere, that game is torture. You go, oh, I was supposed to pay my taxes today, but instead I spent 9 hours playing Odin's Sphere. DId you get out of hell after they turned you into a rabbit? No. I didn't. But I did pull up plenty of the fruits that grow in hell secretly that you can get if you know where they're located, because you recognize the little popping things that come up when the fruit's underneath the soil in hell are...at? So the thing about Odin's Sphere is that there are long cut scenes. It's a Japanese game, and the cut scenes are like, 10 minutes long. And the first couple times you come to one, you think, cut scene, you are too long. But the game is not going to hurry along for you, and so you get accustomed to it. And then the thing happens that was supposed to happen, which is you become emotionally involved. With a plotline that's not incoherent, but too complicated to follow. It's like two Russian novels stacked one on top of the other. And but these people occasionally deliver these lines with such - uh - a wound in their voice, you know, I had it programmed so I would hear it in Japanese and read the subtitles on the screen. And the chorus of this song is one moment where a person who's got fumes rising from them - that means they live in hell - reminds a couple of people that their condition in life is a little different from hers. (Enoch 18:14)
• This is a love song. [audience woo!] Thank you! I never get tired of that. This is a love song about three people [woo!] Right, but it's not a bad scene like that. It's a good scene. It's a hard scene. But, uh, they manage to make it work, so in that sense, although I don't like to come upon a stage and preach, because one, probably if you listen to my stuff we're in general agreement about certain concepts, like people should be able to love who they want, how they want, without any restrictions. [cheering] So I don't know, but it seems to me that if they were having three way marriages in the Bible, to attempt to legislate against other styles of marriage based on Biblical principles, is kind of ridiculous. This song is not a political statement, but it is a story I took from the Bible. (Genesis 30:3)
• Gonna play some old songs now. I don't know if you - wait a second - I'm assuming a fair number of you moved here and didn't grow up here. Do you remember the first time you get tot his town and you're in the car, maybe you're the first time on the highway, you see all these names you've maybe seen once or twice, or maybe you've never even imagined there's a place where they have words like that on signs. I grew up in CA, [cheering] yeah, and we have streets like Colima, which is probably pronounced Colima, and [unintelligble] boulevard, and so I was pretty taken with the name of the bridge we crossed the first time we came here. I put the name of it in this one. (Going to Port Washington )
• What's more fertile ground for inspiration than child stars? Who run aground? (Song for Dana Plato)
• I'm actually gonna play a song called From TG & Y, which was a little store that I didn't shop at, but I did shop at the newsstand nearby. You could push magazines under the door. It was awesome. (From TG & Y)
• This is kind of an uncomfortable disclosure - I should tell you this song is about that feeling that you occasionally get that a body you inhabit was supposed to go to somebody else, and you're not sure how you feel about that, and then at some point you say, well there is actually nothing I can do about that, and you become a, what's the word - depressed. (Hebrews 11:40)
• This was on the Sunset Tree. It's a song - I have told this story more than once this tour, and because I am the purest of the pure of the 90s generation, I feel guilty if I tell the same story twice to anybody. But just inc ase you haven't heard, Dennis Brown, I'm not actually related to him. There have been some people out there who think that he's my stepfather. But he was Bob Marley's favorite reggae singer. If my stepfather had been Bob Marley's favorite reggae singer, I suspect I would have had a whole different set of issues. I think I would probably still have issues. I dunno what I would do without my sisues to be quite honest with you. Dennis Brown was a singer, and his voice was like a thin stream of honey cascading down a waterfall over some rocks, and he was the most awesome singer. And he developed a terrible [audience member yells] - I strive to be worthy of you ma'am - he developed a terrible drug habit, and this is called Song for Dennis Brown. (Song for Dennis Brown)
• It's so awesome to be here because, you know, the record came out on October 6, and that night we did the Colbert Report, and one thing you didn't get to see is that they do the one song that you do on tv, and then you do one just for the audience. Which is right exactly my style, because my main chief problem with the modern world is that everything is broadcast and recorded. I like the idea of some things never seeing light. That's what I'm into. We sang this song for a small audience with Stephen, and it's exciting to be looping around like that. This is called This Year, and you can sing it if you want. (This Year)
• This is a song I wanna play, this is a song that I want you to sing with me, and maybe for me for most of the song, so that I can stand up here play my guitar with my band and Owen over here on the piano. And this is a song about the moment, that I hope you don't have, but really, if we study odds and so forth, some of you are gonna have, the moment and when it comes, you'll be all bummed and stuff. Because you say, shoot, I've invested a lot of time and love into this marriage and now, now I seem to have - you know, you look at the wedding album sometimes, drinking, and go wow, all of the hope and promise of that day comes down to one bottle of generic tequila. And may god help and preserve the person who tries to pry it from my angry hands. (No Children)
• I don't know, have we played this song once this tour? [Peter: Once.] Maybe once. This is a very old song. And if I remember correctly, I wrote it on either Christmas Day or the day after, and I was like man, there's something in that song. And I wrote it 4 or 5 times, 'cause I was pretty excitable in those days. And there was a version that went like this [intense strumming that only very loosely resembles Going to Georgia] but I didn't settle on that. I didn't wind up using any of the versions that I recorded and thought, maybe that song will just die. But then I did it on a radio show about a month later and that's the version that wound up on Zopilote Machine. (Going to Georgia)

Videos